Miroslav Bednář

* 1933

  • "We were at the house, behind it was a barn. Suddenly a shot went off. We got scared and ran away. There was a German deserter hiding in the barn by the house and he thought they were looking for him. He didn't know they had come [to the store]. So he shot at the officer, but missed him. As there were two shop windows, he shot one of them, it spilled out. The bullet went all the way into the store because the door was closed from the inside when they were putting something in the window. It was boarded up for a long time afterwards because there was no glass to be bought."

  • "Of our people, Mr. Netušil took it. He invited the Russians, as if they had liberated us, so he will treat them. Besides, he showed them the album. In that album he had someone related to him who was wearing a German military uniform. The Russian took a pistol and said, 'Pic, German!' And at home at the table, he shot him here in this house. That was somewhere around the fourth or sixth of June, I was looking at the tombstone."

  • "Some of them went to Nekoř and came to the last house up there. There they built a cannon and fired at a Russian tank. But he must have gotten fed up, saw their aim, and started firing from the tank into Nekor. The first shot came out on the Vyrov and went into the house. It blew the whole shield off. The second shot just hit this road, as the photo shows. The Germans were also running away on horseback, they had bicycles and cars. They just scattered. I was walking with my mother to the river at that time. She was waving a cloth. And suddenly it went 'boom' into the water and 'boom' again! Some German who ran away shot at us. We were this close to being shot by him. I remember it to this day, how the bullet flew into the water and the air behind it. So we quickly got away from there."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Nekoř, 15.03.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 01:25:27
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

I went to wash clothes with my mother and a German shot at us.

Miroslav Bednar around 1950
Miroslav Bednar around 1950
photo: archive of a witness

Miroslav Bednář was born on 20th June 1933 in Nekoř, in the foothills of the Orlické Mountains. His father Mikuláš (1901-1988) worked as a carpenter, among others on the construction of the Pastviny dam, his mother Václava (1902-1961) was a seamstress and he had a sister Jaroslava (1938-2024). He was a direct witness of several events during the Second World War. Nekoř is located very close to the national road, so it was busy there at the end of the war. At first, German families fled from the borderlands through the village. On May 5, German transports moved along the state road, withdrawing from the approaching Soviet army, and on May 8, the surrounding fields were flooded with German soldiers and civilians. The traffic peaked on May 9 with the arrival of the first Soviet tank. Miroslav and his mother then miraculously escaped death when a German soldier fired at them. The Soviet army brought not only the joy of liberation to Nekoř, but also bitterness when one of its members shot a local citizen. Miroslav trained as an auto mechanic in Žamberk and after the war, in 1953-1955, he joined OEZ Letohrad, where he repaired cars and worked as a driver of various vehicles. In his work he drove workers and Soviet soldiers to construction sites, militiamen, agitators, directors or skiers, over whom OEZ held patronage. In 1956, he married Zdeňka Mertelíková (1936-2022) and they had two children in 1958 and 1961. In 2024 he was living in Nekoř.